This Classy Bong Is a Design Nerd’s Dream

Meet the Aura, the closest thing to a Chemex the stoner world has seen yet.

One weekend last summer, in the dank of the afternoon heat, I was seized with a sudden inscrutable urge to buy a bong. It was a harebrained scheme if ever there was one. As a boring yuppie on the other side of 30, I'd pretty much given up smoking pot recreationally (too sleepy!!), unless something was being passed around. While I'm confident I could still roll a blunt in the backseat of a Honda Civic from muscle memory, smoking weed in non-social situations had dropped out of the bottom of my daily interests, like "photography" and "Wong Kar-wai films" and "finishing books."

But my girlfriend had gone out of town for the weekend, and with the apartment to myself, I found myself bored and wanting to get [inflects Dave Chappelle's white-guy voice] high as hell, man. Ideally surrounded by a phalanx of snacks while listening to wavy electronic shit. My goal was essentially to assemble a personal time machine back to 2005 out of Papa John's boxes. So, after placing a call to a delivery guy, I went to the head shop on my block in search of something to smoke out of. I was in the mood for something smooth yet economical. (And, er, not a vape.) What I wanted was a nice, icy bong.

In my head, it'd maybe even be something classy: something with clean lines that I could leave out on the coffee table or stuff flowers into. I don't know. Maybe a white marble bong? (Do they make marble bongs?) Surely nice bongs exist now!

Of course, this fixation was...misguided. Every glass piece looked like a psychedelic dick pump manufactured by Mountain Dew. I wanted something austere. Minimal. Something that made it look like I had a modicum of good taste, even though the end goal was to lounge around in mesh basketball shorts.

I eventually settled on a small, white-and-gold little fella with an ice catcher. It was fine, but it wasn't quite right, and now it sits tucked away in a cupboard. But ever since that afternoon, I've had my eye out for a high-minded contraption befitting a dude with a Roth IRA. I wanted a Chemex, essentially, but a Chemex capable of BONG RIPS.

Hence the Aura. It's pretty, like something they'd sell next to the yoga mats at Whole Foods. It's as close a descendent of the Dieter Rams school of trendy minimalism as we've seen yet in the bong world. It was engineered by four industrial designers on the West Coast (with real day jobs! At actual firms!) who were looking for the same characteristics that I was in a water pipe. The project began in earnest in November 2014, when the four friends were seniors in college. They saw an opportunity to build something beautiful, says Mauricio Romano, one of the designers behind the Aura, paying careful attention to nuances like clean lines, fluid dynamics, a sturdy base, quality machined parts that were easy to clean. Real design-nerd shit.

Recently the Aura guys sent me a prototype to try out. On a warm spring night, I filled the chamber with water and ice, loaded a strain called Pineapple (???) into the bowl, and took a rip. I'm not going to pretend to understand how air circulated in the thing, but what surprised me was how evenly the Aura gurgled, filling the chamber with a rich, clean milk. The bowl itself had a lovely heft that dropped into the platter with a satisfying plunk. I cleared the chamber. I felt nice.

(Then I took the whole thing apart, cleaned it in the kitchen sink, and spent 15 minutes standing there thinking about how good the warm water felt on my hands.)

While the Aura (~$250) isn't on sale just yet, Romano tells me they're about a month away from taking orders. (You can learn more about it here.) I might just keep it out on display, too. Maybe put an orchid in it.